We are back, singing in person

Cerddorion is singing in person again. Concert venues in New York State are required to ensure that all performers and attendees be vaccinated.

We are rehearsing distanced and masked. Most of us wear special brackets under our masks to create space between our faces and the masks. Singing with masks is a challenge. Since the regular rehearsal space is not available, we rehearse in the church sanctuary. This poses an additional challenge, because the echo that makes a concert sound good also makes rehearsing difficult.

But we muddle along, and we are enjoying rehearsal more than usual, as it has been so long since we sang together.

Our concert will be on Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 3pm Eastern Time, St Ignatius of Antioch Church on W 87 St at West End Ave. See https://cerddorion.org for tickets. The link will be ready soon.

 

Our live June concert is available for viewing

 On June 10, 2021, we overcame many technical obstacles and performed live on the web. It was the world premiere of Sidney Boquiren's commissioned work, Arise. Please enjoy it if you haven't yet.

 The music begins a few minutes after the video starts.

Arise: A Live Online Concert, June 10, 2022, 8pm US/Eastern Time

On Thursday, June 10 at 8 p.m., Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble will perform our debut concert via live-remote performance. Neither a pre-recorded "virtual choir" nor an in-person concert, this event will use software that enables us to sing together in real time, from physically distant locations. 

Our program is itself a world premiere: Arise, by New York composer Sidney Boquiren, is a compelling setting of the words of prominent U.S. suffragists.  

We initially envisioned Arise as the centerpiece of our June 2020 concert — to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, and to close our 25th anniversary season. When we learned about new possibilities for creating live ensemble music online, we approached Dr. Boquiren... and he has spent the last several months adapting the piece specifically for live-remote performance. During our June 10th livestream, you'll have the chance to hear him discuss this process and to pose your questions. We'll also fill you in on what it's been like for Cerddorion to rehearse in this new and very different way.

We will reach out to you closer to the concert date to provide details on how you can tune in. Please join us, as Cerddorion ARISES to sing for you again!

Dido and Aeneas

Cerddorion had performances scheduled for 2020 of Dido and Aeneas, with distinguished soloists and choreographed staging. Then Pandemic changed our plans. Of course, we are unable to perform in enclosed public spaces. Singing is very much part of our lives, and not singing together and for audiences takes that part out of our lives. What can we do? Well, we still sing, and as you can imagine, it’s difficult.

Because of the lag time of internet-transmitted sound (known as latency), it’s not possible to sing together. Despite that, we are doing it in rehearsal. We are not currently working on a virtual choir such as the one in this video, though we haven’t ruled it out. Instead, we meet in rehearsals, using cutting edge technology that aims to reduce latency to acceptable levels. In recent months, we have put in a lot of time and effort to using it, hoping to produce an artistic and beautiful sound. By the time we succeed, luck may make public gatherings possible once again. We still don’t know how Pandemic will play out, but there are trends that give hope.

In the meantime, please enjoy this recent recording of an interesting arrangement of one of the numbers from Dido and Aeneas. This is by Annie Lenox with London City Voices.

VOCES8 performs A Boy and a Girl by Eric Whitacre

VOCES8 is an ensemble, usually of eight voices, based in England. Here it is in London singing a piece by Eric Whitacre.

Tom Reingold

Unusual and ambitious for Cerddorion: Dido and Aeneas, fully staged

Last week, Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble announced its upcoming concert of The Book of Rounds. Very soon after that concert, Cerddorion presents a fully staged opera, something we don't normally do. We are collaborating with Christopher Caines Dance to put the entire work into an innovatively staged production of Dido and Aeneas. The opera was published around 1688 by English composer Henry Purcell. It tells the story of the widowed queen of Carthage, Dido, with Trojan prince Aeneas.

We will offer two performances:

Location: Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, 152 W 66 St (near Amsterdam Ave), Manhattan

Times: Friday, March 27, 8 pm
            Saturday, March 28, 3 pm

Buy tickets here

To learn more: Ellen Harris wrote about the opera's history in The New York Times in December of 2017: The More We Learn About ‘Dido and Aeneas,’ the Less We Know

An unusual concert: The Book of Rounds

Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble usually presents concerts with varieties of music selected from many centuries. This is our 25th year, and all of our concerts break out of our normal mold. Our March 1 concert will be of a single work called The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace. The work is written by Julie Flanders and Emil Adler. This song cycle bridges pop, classical, and choral music. In the creators’ words, each original round is “a fugue of positive messages. The cyclical structure of the musical round lifts the words beyond their ordinary meanings into an enveloping and transformative experience for singer and listener alike.” Joining us in this collaborative venture are two youth ensembles from the Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School: Vox Nova Boys Choir and 5th Grade Choir (Emily John, Director).

This concert will be on Sunday, March 1, 2020, at 3pm at St Ignatius of Antioch, 552 West End Ave, entrance on W 87 St.

See https://cerddorion.org for tickets or click here.